Israel Armstrong—the hapless duffle coat–wearing, navel-gazing librarian who solves crimes and domestic problems while driving a mobile library around the north coast of Ireland—finds himself on the brink of thirty, in this fourth mystery in the series. But any celebration, planned or otherwise, must be put on hold when a troubled teenager—the daughter of a local politician—mysteriously vanishes. Israel suspects that the girl's disappearance has something to do with his lending her American Pastoral from the library's special "Unshelved" category. Now he has to find the lost teen before he's run out of town—all while he attempts to recover from his recent breakup with his girlfriend and tries to figure out where in Tumdrum a Jewish vegetarian might celebrate an important birthday.